Gold does have a degree of commercial value, but I would argue that beyond what someone is willing to trade for it, it’s value really lies in the “perception” of its value. You can’t eat it and it’s value is not determined by you or me, but by the market. Here is an article that says the same.
The statement of intrinsic value means that people seem to think that somehow gold is mythical in that it is automatically always accepted as an exchange method. People say something like “the gold standard.” That refers to several things, but I’m just saying in the sense of if things go bad, gold will always work to be exchanged for things. That is not true, so that’s not intrinsic value.
Certainly, you can melt gold down and it has some utilitarian value. Silver has gone up because it’s being used a lot in microchips and those kinds of things, so it’s got a utilitarian value that way—a use value. Gold is no more valuable than someone else’s willingness to accept it in exchange for something. It’s what my friend Rabbi Lapin, who wrote the book Thou Shall Prosper, says that money in that sense is spiritual—not in the sense that it’s a religious spiritual thing, but it’s spiritual in that if I’m willing to accept beads in exchange for food or beads in exchange for a place to sleep, then that might have been the case with Columbus.
In other cases, people might be willing to accept rocks in exchange for something else. Some people might exchange paper that has a certain color to it. The only reason we’re willing to exchange that is because we think that someone else will later exchange it for something else. The paper itself does not have value. It’s just green paper. The gold rock does not have value. It’s just a gold rock. The only value that anything has is to the extent that someone else would pay for it, in terms of a medium of exchange to operate an economy on.